On Lying to Children

We teach children not to lie. We teach them that lying is an act of cowardice and an affront to the dignity and respect that others deserve, so of course we feel comfortable lying to children. We actually seem to enjoy holding the truth over them, just out of reach. We invest energy and years into feeding their delusions only because they are willing to accept what is being told to them. This is their nature, as is human nature when sources beyond our direct involvement or understanding (the media, government, laws...etc.) dictate how we are to think. But how much more human potential could be unlocked if we valued the truth as much as we value maintaining a child's delusions?

The child molester lies to his victim to gain access to their trust, but just imagine what that child would do in that situation if the child molester had told the kid the truth upfront. Image if what society told our trusting children was the truth also, and what kind of change that next generation could bring about in the world as a result of knowing the truth. If the truth could save a child from trusting a child molester, then truth could save a child from trusting our kindly police, teachers, parents, and society in general as immediately. Imagine for a second how many children would be saved. Imagine how many could be saved from committing the hypocrisies of adulthood if they were told as children to loathe corporate and political hypocrites as much as they are told to fear "strangers." 

The next time someone respects a child's dignity, it will be because they will be telling them the truth. And while it's true that "the truth hurts," how much pleasure do lies, sarcasm, and delusions bring? How much disillusionment and disengagement could be spared in our young adults if as children they were reared from the start to know how the world is and what it will take to change it? Imagine how many children could be saved from learning the lies of our fast-money, sex-obsessed, violent, materialist, culture of selfishness and sin from all those back-window sources, if we as adults could be there at the front door to greet them with the truth when they asked for it? How many could be spared the draconian sentences of the law for naively exposing themselves to each other if they could be told upfront how the law does more to punish them than it does to protect them? 

Empowerment is the enemy of ignorance, and it is given with the truth. It does no child any good to have the truths of life withheld from them, even the most unfriendly truths. For instance, everyone says "death is a part of life," but no one wants to accept that a child of theirs is ever going to die. People either deny to themselves the fact that children are living entities capable of death, or they deny to themselves and to their children the fact that living things have to die, in order to keep their emotions on the issue intact. They have to lie to themselves to justify stripping the humanity away from a child in the process of protecting that child's delusions. Delusions that keep the child a corporate slave, for instance, do little to nothing to empower them, no matter how much "girl power" or "guns and ammo" you get them drunk on, but the truth will always set them free. 

Every lie to a child is also a lie to the one perpetuating the lie. The one confusing the maintenance of ignorance for the "safeguarding of innocence" is lying to herself. The liar is only safeguarding themselves from their own anxiety. The liar is only safeguarding their authority and control over a child's will born out of their fear of the world. Conversely, the one telling the truth to the child is the only one doing everything the liar has convinced herself she is doing. The one telling the truth is actually the one doing the protecting, respecting, and sparing of the child from grief. If a child is capable of asking a question, they are capable of hearing the truth as assuredly as they are capable of hearing a lie. The air does not discriminate one from another. 

Entitlement and Perseverance

People say that we millennials are an entitled generation, and I think it's an accurate description. We grew up under the mantra of entitlement and saw the world at our feet, and now that we are entering the job market, still expect it to be there. We won't settle for less because we expect the most. We expect fairness, honesty, and equal opportunity, and because we are so disposed to demand such things, we are envied by those who were born having to settle for whatever they could get, and from that envy comes their damning characterizations of us. Of course not all people born between the years 1980 and 1995 are this way, but since this is how the same adults have chosen to represent us, we're obliged to indulge them.

We'll graduate from the top schools and go on aid missions around the globe, have resumes that stretch a page by the time we're fifteen, but we don't know the basics of punching a time clock, showing up and putting out, day in and day out. We're more special than ordinary people. Mowing the lawn for cash was never going to get us into Princeton, so we never did it. We then expect a title and a name on the door right out of the production line degree mill we just graduated from, and because those same adults always told us it was all within reach since we were small, we're demanding it now. Some of us are actually finding it, and some are facing the reality we always knew was there (despite the adults' best efforts to hide it from us).

And it's all thanks to the notion that "Every child should go to college." It's all thanks to the notion that "children who don't go to college turn out to be sleeping in the streets." When every child goes to college, we turn into a society of a skills abundance in limited use. It's all thanks to that notion that "no child should have to face adversity." It's all thanks to the concept that "children are innocent, and therefore must be spared from the adult world." I say, welcome to the new, happier, freer adulthood, where anyone can be anything they want to be--born not out of austerity, but from the dream of abundance--and pursuing not society's destruction (for once), but its constant creation and rebirth.

We of course remember those who came before us (...those who would criticize our sense of entitlement now), and struggle to live up to their esteemed shadow:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for angry fix.

--Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"  (1956)

But with entitlement comes responsibility, and we just have higher aspirations than being "destroyed by madness" or settling for less. We have careers to think about.

Now I still believe in reality, despite how I was raised--a reality where nobody cares about anyone, and least of all me. At the same time, I think there are still lessons to be learned from this cultural shift--from those who settle for whatever they can get to those who believe the choice is theirs--and that is of perseverance. Where the best among the youth of the past were having good times, destroying all modernity, the best of this generation are embracing modernity, and contributing for the good of society--not because they have to, but because they want to.

No child should "ever" have to face disappointment, they said, so I refuse to be disappointed. No matter what disappointment rears up, I refuse to let it put me down like it did those before me, because "greatness" is inevitably within my grasp, as it is for everyone equally, eventually. Reality, bring on the world.

The Smartest People in the Room

How much better off does it really make you to be smart enough to know how to create justifications for negative consequences? There are people whose whole job it is to do nothing else, and it's typically called "public relations," but that is only half of the rotten fruit being sold to you as ripe. What good does it do to graduate at the top of your class if that status propels you into a position that only brings out the worst in you? On the whole, it makes little sense to squander one's abilities for any reason. It seems, though, as often as people take the low road and do just that for no reason at all, or even for good reasons, just as many decide to take the even lower road and squander their abilities in the promotion of malicious or devious ends, if only to put their learning to "some" use. It is not because they are "bad people," it's just that they are raised in a learning environment where they are prompted to "give in" more than they are empowered to resist.

I know this firsthand from my own experience with higher education, where I was tempted to undermine my own credibility at times to ensure I made the grade and gave the average response to every question. Staying "in" was more important to me than rising "above," due to the potential of falling back down. In conversation with fellow students, I observe more "giving in" and "giving up" in institutions of higher learning than anywhere else (and certainly more than in the workforce), and it seems that it's because nowhere else is one's conformity so desirable towards their so-called longevity (outside the military, that is). Just as much as a wasted talent seems a shame to me now, even more so does a talent that has been put to misguided use via people-pleasing conformity. You could say, it is better that you should be a failure who does good work than a success who wallows in their justifications for iniquity.

For instance, what is the value of a higher education when so-called "outside the box" thinking means finding new ways to scam, lie to, or deny people a critical service? The phrase "smartest people in the room" originated to describe the men who ran Enron during the corruption scandals that brought the company down, and is pejoratively used now to describe any group of people who use their brilliance for malevolent ends. Many of those who engineered the economic collapse for their own gain could also be considered among the "smartest people in the room"--those who were smart enough to discover how to push buttons all day and make obscene amounts of money in the process, introducing little to no innovation or development into society. Where does it lead you as a conscionable individual coming out of the college system when the so-called "smartest people in the room" have the least integrity? There are many examples of how unbridled passion without reason can cause the collapse of a person and a society, but it seems equally perilous when self-concerned reason is exercised without regard to an empathic concern for one's fellow human beings. Those who are smart enough to switch off their conscience in the light of some flimsy justification suffer from a lack of integrity.

What good does it do one to be the the most educated and adept person in the room at exploiting loopholes to get away with corruption?  What good does it do you to be pushed into pursuing some college-bound path from the time you're born as if it's the only option in existence, where your future is mapped out long before you can even see any concrete routes to take within it-- much less have enough of an identity to know which route to take? And what good would it do you then, being in that situation, to set an uncharted course through that labyrinth with only a fabled "exit" in mind and no concrete idea of how to go about finding it, lining other people's pockets and ensuring your own indentured servitude to debt in the process? Higher education is capable of doing great things for the world, but so are people with vision, passion, and freedom from debt. You can be the smartest person in the room without having to forfeit your personal integrity to acquiesce to some "company line" of whatever institution or organization "accepts you" once you "get out." Education was never meant to be a conveyor belt upon which you just sit and accept whatever people instruct you to think. It ought to be a platform from which you can, as an independent voice, graciously challenge the scams, lies, and conspiracies that are propping up those very same people who do nothing but acquiesce to injustice-- it should give you the tools to refute them rather than become them. 

Higher education ought to be about making complicated systems more humane and more responsive to human beings-- not merely training on how to give a false smile, a firm handshake, and an automatic response that has been programmed into your head to the point you and only you believe it. It doesn't take a smart person to be a public relations slave for a major corporation, for example-- at least, no more than it would for a trained dog drooling on command-- so why one would waste all that time and money just to end up the equivalent of a drooling dog in the workplace seems beyond reason. That is, unless one's reason is to simply do anything (no matter the consequences) on the pretense of the Nuremberg defense, or the "need to make a living," or more appropriately, the "need to repay a debt." Only because the drooling corporate slaves out there are not alone responsible for the negatives of the world do they find some absolution from consequences. But why betray your conscience if you don't have to?

In a world where it is still possible to make a living doing positive and pro-social things for the world, choosing to contribute to something that produces more negatives than positives on the justification that it "repays the debt" sounds more like defending one's conscience through excuses. No one, unfortunately, is more skilled at turning off their conscience to become a slave to flimsy justifications than the so-called "smartest people in the room." And ironically, no one appears more well-equipped to combat those "professional justifiers" than those among the smartest minds who happen to still have the virtues of empathy, honesty, and a thirst for social justice intact. It all begins in the home. Empowerment breeds integrity. Conformity creates corruption.

Asking Questions

Somewhere between the sixth and 18th year of life, the mind goes from asking the big questions about nature and the universe, to asking questions about "which facts are important to know for the test." After 12 years of schooling, the brain becomes accustomed to simply "channeling" a wide range of information with no clear context, meaning, or significance, from one piece of paper to another. It becomes adept at spitting back information that has been dictated to it and dumped into it, on request. Children slowly lose their curiosity as "learners" the better they become at being "students."

It is not until college and graduate school that "students" are encouraged to once again revisit the natural curiosity that so captivated them in those early years of life, but by that time so many have chosen to give up on their studies and many don't have the resources to go on in it anyways. They essentially grow never "wondering about things" outside of the context of daily living and survival, and just as well know little about how to go about learning things to begin with even if they wanted to. It surprises me how often children will ask "why is the sky blue," only to get an "I don't know" response from an adult 20-30 years the child's senior. It's as if adults just stop wondering about the basics of the world they live in after a while. "How to learn" was just never taught to them in all those years of being fed facts they soon forgot.

Good teachers know all of this to be true, and work to make it work, even given the enormous constraints placed on them by the prevailing 20th-century industrial methodologies. A few observations from human development can go a long way towards actually tapping into that youth's natural desire to "know things" rather than simply "putting that on hold for 12 years." The first observation would be that children, and people in general, don't learn anything by being taught (or told), they learn by learning (which is doing). The second: that people don't learn by retaining random bits of information, they learn by drawing their own connections between information. The third: that people don't learn from accessing tomes secluded away from daily life, but learn best when information has meaning they can relate to issues and themes in daily life that they care about. The fourth: that people don't learn unless they've been shown how to learn.

The young child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The old child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The "person" learns by asking questions and seeking answers. At no point does a person learn anything by having questions asked of them, unless the question is, "How will you go about solving/learning this?"  or  "What do you think will happen because of this?" Good teachers are asking, but culture isn't.

Two words: Lev Vygotsky.

If you want to learn more about the man and his work, how would you go about finding out? What did you find out when you did that?

Rub Their Noses in It

Child welfare can either be designed to provide for the common good, or for the individual child's good. Rarely can it do both. One might get away with arguing that the very need for a Child Protective Services proves that parents are unable to manage their families one hundred percent of the time without intervention by the state, but who gets to hold the state accountable when a kid is abused in foster care, or aged out of the system? Indeed, some parents are abusive either because of their emotional temperament, their frustration due to lack of experience, or stress due to circumstance, but what is often forgotten is that the same is also true about state care.

The very need for there to be such a thing as a family proves that the invisible "state" is unable to manage its wards one hundred percent of the time without intervention by families. The state needs families to provide the actual parenting. So while everyone is expected to be clamoring toward the state to be the arbiters of good parenting on behalf of inexperienced mothers and fathers--as the common citizen under investigation is expected to bend over backwards to appease what the state has considered to be a breech of parenting duties--the state on its own is the least capable parent of all. It is nothing more than a set of decrees, lawbooks, and assorted professionals disassociated from the child. It can not do the direct work of parenting a child, but it believes itself to be morally and systematically superior to all those who would try.

It would dictate terms that it itself could not follow to the letter. If you dropped a child off at the doorstep of this invisible authority, "the state," do you think those pretty columnated buildings, stacks of forms, and hives of representatives in large varnished courts could even be able to hold the child's spoon, much less teach her right from wrong? Of course not, and for this reason, the state has decided that human beings are necessary to at least do the direct care work for the child on behalf of the state, to be the arms and legs of the state--to be there to hold the spoon and teach right from wrong. And seeing as human beings generally see the value of consistency in a child's development, the state prefers the child's biological parents over just anyone to do the work it can't do. When it determines that the parents are ill-equipped or unable to do this work, it will find what it determines to be suitable replacements--in this day in age, another family.

The state therefore relies on the family to do the essential work of raising children, and families rely on the state to provide their children with education and securities, for instance. One may be tempted to believe this is a holy symbiosis, but is it truly a viable social contract? The state grants itself powers to judge parent and child relationships according to its internal calculus, but what mechanism allows the family to judge the state when it fails to meet its obligations to the children in the realm of education and securities? While parents face court removal of their children when they are deemed incapable, what does the state face when it could be deemed incapable of holding up its end of this so-called social contract?

Do we get revolution when that happens? Do we get people suing the state? Do the people rise up and take their children out of the public school for a year's time while the state is forced to work out its issues and show its constituents mandatory improvements? The rush to place children in private and charter schools may be indicative of what we could term a slow "termination of state custodial right" if the same charge were being leveled at a family. Do non-abusive parents effectively get to assume custody of foster children when the state fails to protect them? Of course not, the state retains its wards even when it fails to be a proper parent to them--and it's the equivalent of allowing abusive parents to retain custody of their children.

Maybe it's in unknowingly ignoring a child who is being abused in their foster home; maybe it's in aging a child out of a foster home without nurturing them into adulthood; or maybe it's in over-medicating a child who acts out because he misses home--however the abuse and neglect manifests itself, the state is able to get away with retaining custody over wards it has failed to adequately parent because it is working under the pretense of the common good. So long as cases of maltreatment within the system are in the minority, the idea of serving the common good is preserved, and therefore, it becomes easier to overlook the individual cases. Serving the interests of the common good does little to suit the needs of individual children, but serving the dignity and needs of individual children is always in the interests of the common good.

To this end, we should incite the charge that one case of maltreatment while a child is in the custody of the state is one case too many. No majority is large enough that we should ignore the injustice served to the minority.

Just as parents though, the state can not be expected to have a clean record when it comes to its own duties over the education and protection of children it has been entrusted with. This is understandable, seeing as it takes adequate care of the majority of its wards, but though understandable, we can't be lulled to sympathy for it. It expresses no sympathy toward parents who fumble the responsibility, even as the majority of them are also capable. What we should expect from the state is accountability and honesty for when it fails in its task of raising children in its custody, just as it expects from families. They may have the power to be dishonest, and paint a rosy image with the broad strokes of "common good," using statistics to show how much good they are doing, but nothing ought to allow them to hide away each and every case where they have been the ones to drop the ball.

Glory only their successes, but hold their feet to the fire for their failures. It's our duty to rub their noses in it.

Public School Originality

Any place that forces kids to salute the flag and say the pledge of allegiance every day, to the point where they can be disciplined for simply, peacefully opting out of it, has thrown all aspirations of inspiring original thinking out the window before the day has even kicked off. The message is loud and clear--the only thinking permitted is whatever permutation one can construe out of the boundaries of that spoken contract of allegiance with government, culture, and society. The kind of thinking that comes with questioning the so-called importance of showy oaths over substance is the stuff that detentions are made out of it--insubordination and sedition where the kid ought to be getting a commendation for thinking freely. Public school is a place where these agendas have confused themselves.

And this is just the most clear example of the ways the school is set up to quench truly original thinking in its student body, and in the grand scheme of things, not anywhere near the most severe one. Such distinction belongs to the methods of profiling students for their potential to commit offenses and restricting them in such manner (such as the Mosaic 2000 program), the archaic scheduling of the school day and the curricula, and the school-to-prison pipeline our glorious Zero Tolerance policy has unleashed on its unsuspecting kindergartners (particularly those of ethnic minority in lower income communities). In truth, if compulsory schooling was not already a prison in how it locks an individual into "minor status" for a time long enough to be exploited, now those who don't come out fabricated to think in prearranged terms may find the school also doubles as a prison in it of itself (even with power to issue satellite monitoring devices for the truant student to wear even when off grounds).

In light of all this, let's consider the Pledge of Allegiance in the United States, and how little its supposed "hand on heart" adherents in the first grade really understand what they are "consenting" to. I could say that when I was little, and expected to be giving my consent to bend my will to the authority of the state by taking this daily pledge, I often confused words in it, as any child would. Does my confusion at seven, or the inability to understand the complex characteristics involved in making an "oath" to one's country in such convoluted language make the oath invalid? Of course not, you say, because it's a wholesome and Christian oath for a child to make, even if they don't understand what they are consenting to, besides, what damage could it do? And while that is true, no damage is done by being forced to take this daily oath (besides perhaps the dignity of the child), I can't help but wonder what is gained by doing it.

I as a child took the oath as thus, "I pledge allegiance...to the flag... of the United States of America... and to the republic," (I had no idea what a "republic" was), "for whichitstands," (whatever "whichitstands" was supposed to mean), "one nation," (with no idea that this was part of the same sentence), "under God," (I happened to believe in God, but what if I didn't?), "indavisibal," (once again, another word completely lost on a 1st grader), "with liberty and justice...for all!"  (once again, with no idea this is still part of the same highly recursive sentence). Does my inability to understand the consent I was giving in making this oath make it invalid? Once again, no damage done because this is not a legally binding contractual obligation of allegiance the child is unknowingly taking. But if not a legally binding contract, what purpose does it serve to make even the least politically adept toddlers recite it as if they were knowing adherents of it?

Spoiled Into Submission

Sometimes you can beat a child into a fury and spoil a child into submission, injure them with kindness and strengthen them with sternness, build resilience by letting them subsist and entitlement by giving them everything they want. Sometimes carefully structuring a child's environment to work exactly to their developmental mindset only weakens their ability to grow beyond it. The point to any interaction between an adult and a child is not to gratify the child's strengths, but to challenge them.

This is hardly revolutionary--Lev Vygotsky wrote on the Zone of Proximal Development and defined it thus:

"...The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygostsky, Mind in Society 86).

Because we can not count on the "line in the sand" age-limit legal definitions, which automatically render all children regardless of maturity or skill incapable and therefore useless, we (you, me, and society at large--parents, teachers, coaches, adult friends, children themselves) have to be that "more capable peer" who dares challenge a child. We all have to take personal responsibility to ensure that children and youth in general are actually prepared for life at the ages the law arbitrarily sets for those milestones.

The line in the sand age limits imposed on minors, if they are never going away, are NOT the time to begin teaching children how to live, they are benchmarks for all progress up to that point--not the first opportunity to teach a youth a thing or two, but the last. The mythology or "magic" that the law bases its reasoning on as to how children develop into adults (based on their date of manufacture alone) certainly isn't going to do it for us.

If we do expect the law to determine how and when we decide to teach children about how to live in the world--that is, if we wait until their 18th birthday before we decide to stop spoiling them with ignorance and politically correct entitlements--how can we expect them to actually be able to do what is their right to do, and have responsibility for the things they are then responsible for? If we give them no adversarial situations, how do we expect them to handle conflict constructively? Childhood is supposed to be a living, challenging time of life, not a paradise, and the more adults try to make it a paradise, the less livable it becomes.

The law can not raise kids for us, it is too busy harming those who didn't develop properly.